


the craziest kind of contentment

by althusserarien (ArmchairElvis)



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Sherlock, Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-10 02:19:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmchairElvis/pseuds/althusserarien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> Somebody has to pull the trigger. Somebody has to get their hands dirty.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	the craziest kind of contentment

**Author's Note:**

> Written to a prompt at the [Noir Ficathon](http://eternal-elenea.livejournal.com/102733.html?page=2#comments), [here](http://eternal-elenea.livejournal.com/102733.html?thread=506189#t506189). Many thanks to **daasgrrl** for an excellent beta. Title from [How Is Your Heart](http://fuckyeahpoetry.tumblr.com/post/492027162/how-is-your-heart) by Charles Bukowski. Rated Mature for violence and general gloominess. [DW](http://armchair-elvis.dreamwidth.org/252491.html) [LJ](http://joe-pike-junior.livejournal.com/253473.html)

 

The months after he gets back are nothing to speak of, really. Seb has a full bank account and an empty feeling in his chest. He runs a lot. He does push-ups against the sterile-smelling carpet in his nice new flat. He hears the neighbours talking through the walls. The lady who serves him at the café around the corner has a pleasant smile. At night he watches as passing cars stab a beam of light across the ceiling of his bedroom. And none of this really touches him. He doesn’t _join in_ , he’s never had to.

He prints a glossy sheaf of pictures out on a machine at Camera World and sticks a couple of them to his fridge. A post-operational counsellor told him that it would be _helpful_ to have _static images_ to help him _process things_. Photography makes things different. Red splatters in the dust: abstract art. A hand and forearm projecting from the edge of the frame, the fingers splayed: a picture without a story. Documentary photography from a war zone.

The first and only boyfriend he has after he gets back stares at the photos, his mouth working like he's tasted something bad. That was the second date. There isn't a third.

London is colder than Seb remembers. And wetter, too. Something small and childlike and battered inside him begins to delight at little things again. Breathing out plumes of steam on winter nights. Convenience stores and McDonald’s and pints of stout.

He pauses outside the pub at closing time, feeling his face shrink against the cold, and lights a cigarette. A man brushes past him: tight denim, the smell of soap and cheap laundry powder.

 _In a proper society I wouldn’t be out like this_ , Seb thinks. He can feel how fragile people are, how easy it would be to slide his hand up a thigh and into the small of the back, to cradle the back of somebody’s head, to slide a knife between two ribs like a whisper, like a kiss. But it’s the same society that trained him and made him a killer and set him free, so isn’t that a joke?

…

There's a package on his doorstep. No return address, no stamp, brown paper lightly speckled with rain. Seb draws the curtains and turns one light on and empties the box onto the kitchen bench, into the island of Cool White energy-efficient light. For a second he's expecting a bright suffocating bang; for a second he _wants_ it.

A metal mask, flat and heavy. Toneless grey, with creased leather straps. It seems to draw the light. Seb holds it in his hand, hefts it cold against his fingers, and wonders how many people the man who wore this killed. How many hours he lay full-length in the dirt, sour adrenaline breath and limited life expectancy, sweat running down the sides of his face.

Seb takes a slow, full breath. Everything seems so _clear_ all of a sudden: the rain falling softly outside, the yellowing plaster moulding on the ceiling. He lets his mind's eye cast things up against the plain landlord-cream wall: splatter patterns and shadows.

There's a note, too, on thick cream card. The handwriting is small and the lines stray slightly upwards at the end. _Come outside, Sebastian, I'd like to meet you_. So Seb lays the sniper's mask on the kitchen bench and he goes and stands in the doorway of his flat, knowing that with the light silhouetted behind him he's a target. A car draws up, the engine purring. Money doesn't call on you every day. When it does you answer.

…

They’re standing between the goalposts on a set of playing fields. There’s a muffled _hoosh hoosh_ of traffic coming from the motorway two hundred yards away but here, nothing: they’re blanketed by the rising mist and the rain. Jim stands small and smug in a sleek black overcoat. The arc lights make house-sized islands of the night like day. It is very quiet and very still and the rain glints like falling glass.

It reminds Seb of running on the rugby pitch, of whistles and tackle drills and heat rub. Jim _knew_ that the mask would send an animal rush of anticipation down his back and into his groin. Jim probably knows, too, that twenty years ago, before Dartmoor and Brunei and Services No Longer Required, he was a kid who ran his heart out on fields like this, chivvied on by hard-faced men who told him it was either that or the army, that's how you become a _man_ and _God_ , look at him now, he's a machine, he's everything they ever wanted.

Seb has a light windcheater on. He knows what this is. It's fucking _theatre_. He'll stand here under the wide starless sky and try not to shiver. He’ll audition for Jim. Jim’s eyes are friendly but empty, like a game show host. Not an enemy, not really a friend.

Seb can see something running out there. A dark blur in the shadows at the edge of the field. That warm feeling he'd almost forgotten fills his gut, and he can smell grass and Jim’s sweat-cologne scent. Jim hands him a cheap briefcase and a pair of latex gloves. His voice is soft, friendly.

"It has to look like suicide. The bottle of whiskey's not for you, it's for him. It’s _blended_."

Seb shivers, his stomach clenching in anticipation. He nods, and Jim turns away, his small, almost graceful hands instinctively setting his tie to rights. Jim takes out his phone and sends a message. The car engine starts at the other side of the field. In silence, with nothing more than a nod to call this partnership, Seb sets off across the grass.

Either this guy's insane or he reads people like books, Seb thinks. It might be both.

…

_Come with me_ , Jim says. Seb is hungry and alone and used to following orders, so he does. _Love me, reinforce me, stop me_ , Jim says, and Seb does that too.

Jim is a wraith in a five-hundred-pound suit. He's a text message away from a bullet in somebody else's head; one pill to make you larger, smaller, to make you forget; a yellow bloom of fire in somebody's front room, a body in the Thames. Somebody has to pull the trigger. Somebody has to get their hands dirty.

…

Seb is walking along the street in Chinatown. It's after dark, he's cold. He's been walking for hours. Earlier this afternoon he broke the front window of a newsagent's in Bethnal Green and ever since then Jim has been sending him text messages and incriminating pictures.

 _I've changed my mind. Go back and kill her_.

Sebastian looks up from his phone as he finishes texting back, _you're too drunk to make life and death decisions_ , when he sees a guy he was friendly with over _there_ ; walking in his direction, his arm around a woman who looks like his girlfriend. Kabul or Beirut maybe -- they all blurred together after a while, and there are whole countries he’s only seen from within a set of blank military-industrial rooms.

Seb is walking past one of those cheesy souvenir shops with plastic Scots Guards and London Bus money boxes, and a neon sign flashes BUREAU DE CHANGE BUREAU DE CHANGE as the man meets his eyes, and Seb turns away as the man ( _Dave? Drew?_ ) calls his name, mumbles _sorry mate you've got the wrong guy_ out of the side of his mouth. As soon as the prickly watched feeling leaves the back of his neck he's half-running, through bright rain-slick streets and on into progressively darker ones, until he's breathless and empty at Jim's door. This is what he is now. A set of steady hands and an empty heart.

The fluorescent bar in the ceiling flickers once, twice, then comes on steadily. Before Seb even has time to think, Jim has him back against the wall. His smile is warm but the warmth stops before it reaches his eyes. His brown eyes glint in his pale face. He hasn’t shaved.

When Seb works his hand in between them to start undoing Jim's shirt, crisp cotton, Jim takes his hands and puts them up against the wall, and Seb thinks _I could stop you I could kill you I could I could_.

“No, let me,” Jim says. His voice is remote. This is a distraction, nothing more than a balm for his senses, something to fill in the empty hours. The next morning Seb finds bruises all along his forearms. The most dangerous man in London.

Jim lives in a hotel. There is a line of suits in the particle-board wardrobe and a line of mobile phones (the ringtones a meticulous catalogue of the last 30 years of pop music) charging on the side table, but apart from that there's nothing in this place to distinguish him, no humanity. Jim moves every week and he won't go back to the luxury hotels: the staff there remember faces.

They sit on the prickly hotel carpet and sip Scotch from hotel drinking glasses, the sort that come wrapped in plastic. Jim drinks a lot, now. He has purple smudges under his eyes and he can't keep his hands still.

"I bet you hid your crushes," Jim says. "I bet you stored up soundbites in your head so it sounded authentic when you said 'nice tits' or 'an arse you can cup your hand around'. Just so you could feel like one of the boys."

His eyes are smiling, now. He has the television tuned to the BBC News Channel with the sound turned down. The light from the screen flickers on his face.

"You don't know what the fuck you're talking about," Seb says, and he goes and stands by the window, angrily pulling his shirt back on. It scares him, sometimes. How much Jim _knows_.

The same generic City businessman has been waiting at the bus stop below since Sebastian came in, standing with his coat collar turned up against his face, staring at his phone.

"What makes you think that?" Jim says softly, then Seb hears him treat himself to another nip of the Macallan. "I know you, Seb. I know what you'd do for me."

"What?" Seb says, and something cold falls into the pit of his stomach. He'd draw a knife, he'd chamber a bullet, he'd throw himself through a plate glass window. All of these things in a heartbeat.

"You'd walk through fire for me," Jim says, and like an afterthought he takes out his phone and sends a text message. Ten minutes later a car comes to the bus stop and takes the businessman away and Seb feels cold, very cold.

…

Another hotel room, another busy little line of buzzing mobile phones. Seb has two stitches on the knuckle of his right hand, tender, red, and they pull at the skin when he makes a fist.

Jim takes a photograph out of a bulging paper envelope. He smiles sweetly, triumphantly, and hands it to Seb. It's a small dark-headed boy with a pale, serious face in the arms of a bored-looking woman in good clothes. Background for the Sherlock Holmes file. It isn’t enough that Jim knows where Sherlock Holmes lives, that he’s seen his medical records, that he’s spoken to the man who dealt coke to him five years ago. He needs more, he always needs more. Jim consumes people.

Seb has taken photographs of Sherlock Holmes hailing taxis and crouching over mouldering bodies. He's watched Jim make a gun out of his hand and smilingly blow Sherlock Holmes away. It's like a sickness. Soon pictures won't be enough. Soon he'll want to play. Somewhere in the roaring emptiness at his centre Jim has found a place for Sherlock. He’s not a man, he’s a vacuum. A joke, a wrecking ball.

"You want to fuck him," Seb says.

"No," Jim says. "He won't play that game. I want to fuck with his _mind_ , the meddling little shit."

Seb has seen a lot of other files. He's finished some off, brought the paper trail to a blunt but definite end. Some of them with a bang, and some of them with a whimper.

Which will Sherlock Holmes be, Seb wonders.

When Jim paces back and forth in his hotel room, his hands fluttering at his sides, Seb wonders which end _he’ll_ have.

…

This time it’s Jim who comes to Seb’s door in the rain, freshly released from the sort of prison they don’t show on a map. He’s wearing the same suit he was when he disappeared, travel-worn, wrinkled at the knees.

Jim sits at Seb’s table and eats ravenously. Spaghetti, cheap pasta sauce from a bottle. Seb leans against the counter and watches him eat. He’s different. He reels off a condensed history of Sherlock Holmes’ life: expelled from one school for stealing, from another (much less prestigious) for running away to London. University career brilliant while it lasted. Sectioned three times under the Mental Health Act. The nineties weren’t good to Sherlock Holmes: bad coke, bad overdose, bad decade. Seb almost feels sorry for the guy, for the way Jim has violated him, for the dirty way Jim laughs when he says _here, I’ll tell you about Sherlock Holmes’ sexual history_ , then holds his breath theatrically for ten or fifteen seconds.

“This is brilliant,” Jim says. “I know how I’ll ruin him.”

“If you still care,” Seb says shortly, “I kept your empire running while you were God knows where.”

“Good,” Jim says, “Keep it that way. I’ve got things to do, now.”

Later on, Jim stretches himself out beside Seb. He’s opened the window, and when the wind blows Jim can hear raindrops hitting the floor. Jim goes on talking late into the night: a persecuted, circuitous narrative of how he pulled detail after detail out of Sherlock Holmes’ brother. Of how he lay on his back in a six foot by six foot cell and tried an imaginary crown on for size. He’s grandiose, disordered, mad.

…

This is how you get a man to do what you want. Seb knows. Treat him well, but not too well. Let him stay hungry, let him stay hurt, let him stay angry. Give him a puzzle and wrap it up in everything he expects of you.

Find the small tender place that hurts him the most.

When Jim says _jump_ Seb says _how far_. Jim taps his fingers and Sherlock Holmes chases him headlong into a trap, a dead end.

The younger Holmes reminds him of Jim, in a way that they're both probably too solipsistic to realise. Seb remembers Jim's hands, the shadows under his eyes and the taste of whiskey on his tongue. _You'll walk through fire_.

Seb has spent hours watching the younger Holmes through a scope. Sherlock Holmes has the arrogance that Seb remembers from the older brother but more energy, a sort of restlessness that seems to come from within him. It would take him a long time to break, Seb thinks: he habitually pigeonholes people by predicted capacity to take torture (nobody will ever know this). Even with blood running down his face and his lungs burning the younger Holmes would give him nothing more useful than a fucking Bach cantata. For a couple of hours, at least.

Seb wonders if the older brother remembers him. A good suit, the sort of old-arrogance public school drawl that makes his stomach burn with hate and fear. Used to giving orders that rarely go unheeded. MI5’s wonder boy, never liked to get his hands dirty. But there are always plenty of young man to do that, earnest and disposable and wily.

A taxi. The flatmate's face. He’s running, he's on the phone. In the back of Seb's mind Jim is up there on the roof, but he doesn't look. The gun in his hands. There's nothing else. The back of the flatmate’s head. The blur of his face, creased with worry. The gun in his hands. His hands.

When the shot comes, Seb lets his finger tighten almost imperceptibly on the trigger. He breathes out. He can’t think. Then a black shape flutters down the side of the hospital, a shadow. And in the screaming eye of the storm between the impact and the arrival of the police, Seb packs up his weapon, his hands shaking slightly. His mind’s eye suffices (with uncomfortable, Kodachrome detail) to fill in the things he didn’t see: the pool of blood around Jim’s head. His slim black suit flecked with blood, already soaking into the wool.

Nobody sees him leave the building. There are sirens approaching. Seb's face is like stone and his throat is tight and hot. He knows what he's supposed to do.

He knew it would happen. Jim whispered it to him when they met in an empty laneway, halfway between Richard Brook and Jim, his eyes empty. _Oh, you'll know what to do, Seb_.

…

In the greasy lane behind a set of restaurants, Seb presses the barrel of his gun into Sherlock Holmes’ belly. Holmes fights like an animal, all teeth and sharp edges, both of them exhausted and desperate and bloody. The gun skitters over the pavement, a corona of black heat explodes in the side of Seb’s head, and Sherlock Holmes is running. Footsteps in the gloom. He'll run because there's nothing left for him here. Run because dangerous men want him dead and running is what even philosophers do when they’re scared. When there’s nothing left for them here.

Seb can taste his own blood, and he lies there cold and empty and bruised and stares straight up into the afternoon sky.

Seb would like to look Sherlock Holmes in the eye once more, he decides. But that can wait. He owns a little part of London, now, and it's time to rebuild, time to tell a madman's story. The sun is in his eyes and there’s blood in his mouth but for now, everything’s quiet and there’s a quiet spark of anger in his chest, a light that won't go out.


End file.
